Network Innovation using OpenFlow: A Survey Lara, A. ; Kolasani, A. ; Ramamurthy, B. Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Univ. of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE (Volume:16 , Issue: 1 )

Outline Introduction Motivation Background knowledge Capability Performance Conclusion

Introduction OpenFlow is currently the most commonly deployed Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology. SDN consists of decoupling the control and data plans of a network.

Motivation One motivation of SDN is to perform network tasks that could not be done without additional software for each of the switching elements. Developed applications can control the switches by running on top of a network operating system, which works as an intermediate layer between the switch and the application. Another motivation is to move part of the complexity of the network to the software-based controller instead of relying only on the hardware network devices.

This survey paper is the first comprehensive document, in our opinion, to discuss the capabilities, applications, deployments and challenges of OpenFlow networks in local and wide area environments. This paper explain how OpenFlow has received major attention among SDN technologies but we also point out the difference between SDN and OpenFlow.

Background knowledge SOFTNET One of the first approaches was SOFTNET , an experimental multihop packet radio network that introduced the idea of adding commands to the contents of each packet. Goal : It was to modify a network node during operation time, using commands written in the SOFTNET language. Motivation :To enable the experiments with different network protocols.

Background knowledge (Cont.) Active Networks (AN) It was to allow packets to contain programs that could be executed by the network devices that they traversed. SOFTNET and Active Networks did not use software components to control the network devices. The programmability of the network was achieved by adding source code to the payload of the packets.

Background knowledge (Cont.) The difference between SDN and the previous approaches is that a software component running on a server or a CPU is added to the architecture of the network. In SDN, the software component is responsible for the control plane of the network. This is why we say that SDN decouples the control and data planes, as this distinction was not as clear in previous approaches.

Capability OpenFlow architectures allow centralized control of the network software-based traffic analysis Ex : DDoS dynamic updating of forwarding rules flow abstraction.

Performance Measuring and modelling the performance of OpenFlow-based networks Improving the performance of OpenFlow-based networks

Challenges Security Availability Scalability Survivability Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and Operating Expenditure (OPEX) Compatibility

Conclusion Applications have been developed OpenFlow switches have been used as a multi-layer network device. more than one controller could be used to address some of the challenges such as availability or reliability Realistic hardware simulations data center virtualization In conclusion, OpenFlow is one of the transformational technologies to affect the networking vendor community in the last decade and exhibits tremendous scope for future research and deployment.